Animal Collective: Origin of the species

Bernard Perusse, Gazette music columnist03.07.2013

Animal Collective’s 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion was adored by critics, so expectations were high for last year’s follow-up, Centipede Hz. All the same, “we try to stay away from getting bogged down in that sort of thinking. It seems to be a creativity muter,” says Noah Lennox, second from left, with Brian Weitz, Josh Dibb and David Portner.

MONTREAL — It would take an entire column to unravel the history of how Animal Collective came to be made up of these four guys.

It’s a complicated story of childhood friends in Baltimore coming together and crossing paths with kindred spirits. That part is typical, but along the way there are plenty of subplots: members moving away to study in other cities, breaks taken from the band and so forth. Throughout the saga, they play and record in various combinations and permutations. And even if the whole project is currently defined by its four members, there’s still a fluid and impermanent quality to the psychedelic-rock quartet, which created serious buzz in the wake of its critically lauded 2009 release Merriweather Post Pavilion.

Noah Lennox (known to fans by his stage name, Panda Bear) was on the phone from Portugal, where he now lives with his wife and two children, to try to shed light on the twisted path taken by Animal Collective.

“The fact that we’ve known each other for such a long time has kept us close, even when one or various members don’t feel the need to be involved at a certain time,” said Lennox, 34. “It keeps everybody in the loop.”

Lennox and Josh Dibb (a.k.a. Deakin) have known each other since they were 8. Brian Weitz (Geologist) and David Portner (Avey Tare) have been friends since high school.

“It’s hard to quantify the effect of our long relationships on the music,” Lennox said. “It’s quite a bit easier to pinpoint how that’s affected other aspects of the band, particularly when it comes to going through hard times, understanding what each other is saying, knowing what we want, knowing what we mean when we say something. Stuff like that.”

Nor did geography inform the band’s music, Lennox said. Being from Baltimore did not intrude on what he described as “our own world.”

“The Baltimore a lot of people might know is not really where we’re coming from, although I have the utmost respect for all the stuff that was going on before we were there, and after. And I have a lot of song titles and references to various things there,” he said. (Indeed, Merriweather Post Pavilion is named after a concert venue in nearby Columbia.)

But even if friendship and environment don’t affect the sound, no music springs up in a void. Merriweather Post Pavilion, for example, frequently evokes Smile-era psychedelic Beach Boys and early Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett, albeit filtered through the sensibilities of guys who grew up playing video games.

And Animal Collective sounds like a group with an ear for pop history.

The sounds that first made an impression on Lennox were the symphonies and ballet music his mother enjoyed, as well as the 1980s radio hits his father listened to in the car, he said.

“The ’80s were the advent of synthesizers in popular music,” he said. “There’s something kind of sad and lonely about a lot of the popular music from that time — at least in America — that has stuck with me. Dave and I have talked about it quite a bit — a very particular feeling it evoked in us as kids. A song will come on now from that time, and he and I look at each other and we both know it belongs in that canon of ‘sad and lonely ’80s songs.’ ” Lennox cited Berlin’s Take My Breath Away as an example.

Lennox said a job in a record store, taken during a four-year period when he was living in New York, expanded his musical vocabulary. The experience, he said, exposed him not only to pioneers like the Beach Boys, but to other crucial influences, like the experimental sounds of the Sun City Girls, the hip hop productions of Timbaland and the 2000 deep-track electro album Multila by Vladislav Delay (“really like nothing I had ever heard before”).

“I identified types of things I really responded to and was inspired to spit back my own version of that stuff,” he said.

Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective’s eighth full-length disc, was the band’s breakthrough. The explosive collection of woozy, harmonic psychedelic gems got an average score of 89 out of 100 on Metacritic, which aggregates reviews by mainstream critics. The website later pronounced the album the most highly acclaimed release of 2009. The influential Pitchfork gave it a 9.6 out of 10.

With a successful album comes the stress of following it up. “It’s a natural inclination to realize there are more people with some kind of expectation than there were before,” Lennox said. “But we try to stay away from getting bogged down in that sort of thinking. It seems to be a creativity muter. At the same time, it’s not like we had any intention to alienate anybody or consciously regress or retreat from anything. But we knew we wanted to do something different. That’s been par for the course for us for a while. Creatively, we’re pretty restless people. It took a little bit of that pressure off.”

True to that philosophy, they followed the breakout album with Centipede Hz, released in September. It was a denser, darker, more challenging disc.

“I’d credit it more than anything to the climate in our lives, stuff that had been going on for us,” Lennox said. “Maybe it’s a bit of a reflection of trends in music, too. That hecticness is a bit more prevalent in music these days than it was 10 years ago. The album is not complicated for the sake of being complicated, but dense and colourful.

“We had this image of a centipede and how it looks like a crazy alien, a really foreign creature, a bit scary and complicated. It was an inspiring image for us as far as wanting to make a musical representation of that creature,” he said.

The recent return of Dibb — who did not play on Merriweather Post Pavilion — coincides with a slight change in the band’s recording and touring process, Lennox said. Until recently, recording was the last event in the life cycle of the songs, which evolved through live performance, he said. For Centipede Hz, however, the recording took place in the middle of the process. As a result, he said, the live show includes much of the new album.

“If we followed the same path as we did three or four years ago, we’d be playing a set that would consist of 85 or 90 per cent totally unreleased songs,” he said. “What we’re playing now is all released songs, some of which will be newer, different versions of older songs. But the majority of the set will be the songs we just released in September.”

Distance has brought the band members far from their origins as Baltimore buddies. Only Dibb remains there, with Portner living in Los Angeles, Weitz in Washington and Lennox in Portugal.

“There are more emails to deal with,” Lennox said. “I’m willing to do a bit more travelling than I was used to. I’m sure the positives have outweighed the negatives.

“There was a bit of trepidation, in varying degrees, within the band when I moved. I, perhaps naively, never expected there would be any change, but some of the others were maybe a bit worried about how we might be able to continue,” he said.

“But more than anything, the defining characteristic of that event is when we do get together, we’ve had some time away from each other and we value our time together more in this scenario than we did before.”

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